Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For ...what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to... see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burthened too much with the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

"There?" he asked and pointed--With his stick, reader, with his stick. S-T-I-C-K, gentle reader. A roughly hewn stick brande...d with the owner's name: Felix Wohlfahrt from Zwickau. With his stickau he pointed, gentle or lowly reader, with his stick! You know what a stick is, don't you? Well, that's what he pointed with--a stick--and got into the car, and left the stick there, upon getting out again, naturally--for the car temporarily belonged to him. I in fact noted that "quiet satisfaction." An artist's memory--what a curious thing! Beats all other kinds, I imagine. "There?"Mhe asked and pointed with his stick. Never in my life was I so astonished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone....These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumentalArgument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm,Storm me forever over her graveLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »